Emerging markets face shifting labor dynamics this session at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026 explores the potential for a jobs crisis and discusses strategies to support employment and inclusive growth.
At Davos 2026, leaders warned of a looming employment gap in emerging markets: over the next 12–15 years, 1.2 billion young people will enter working age, while current projections suggest only 400 million jobs. World Bank President Ajay Banga argued that growth is “necessary… but not a sufficient condition,” calling for a jobs engine built on three pillars: infrastructure (especially reliable electricity), pro-business policy, and catalytic finance targeted at micro and small enterprises where most jobs are created. The Bank’s Jobs Council identified five priority sectors less exposed to AI-driven “outsourcing” volatility: infrastructure/construction, primary healthcare, smallholder agriculture, tourism, and value-added manufacturing.
Singapore President Tharman Shanmugaratnam broadened the frame to “security of a career,” dignity, and lifelong growth, emphasizing early childhood and maternal nutrition and better vocational pathways. He highlighted the green transition as pragmatic job creation: renewable investment has “at least three times higher” job multipliers than fossil fuels.
Panelists stressed inclusion and informality. Sri Lanka’s Prime Minister Harini Amarasuriya urged recognition of unpaid care work that sustains economies yet is “often doesn’t get counted.” Nigeria’s finance minister Wale Edun focused on empowering MSMEs and leveraging distributed solar to unlock digital opportunity. PETRONAS CEO Tengku Muhammad Taufik described rapid AI-driven job redesign and the need for “AI literate” workforces, warning that “companies without AI will do damage to its own people.”
Please sit down.
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Okay. Just checking in with our technical team. Are we ready to start?
Yes.
Wonderful. Thank you so much. I'm absolutely delighted to be here with you. And I apologise for our very start. We will do this opening segment with two very distinguished speakers. And then I will hand over to Stephanie Flanders from Bloomberg to run the full panel. I'm, absolutely delighted to to invite, two members of the forum's board of trustees, the president of the Republic of Singapore and the president of the world Bank Group, to share some framing thoughts from everything we have been hearing this week. Technology, geopolitics, geoeconomics all of it ties down to one key thing that we really care about, which is livelihoods and jobs. And that is what we're going to focus on now. So I'm going to start with the President Banga. You've of course, placed job creation at the very center, of your strategy. Please tell us more.
I thought you would start with age before beauty.
I will let the two of you decide which way you want to start.
I'm going to get back at you sometime.
President Tharman is my hero in many ways, and one of the reasons that we're having this conversation on jobs is because he was kind enough, despite his real role in Singapore, to make the effort to continue his drive towards caring about jobs for young people. That's actually the real framing. It's about jobs for young people. We have over the next 12 to 15 years, 1.2 billion young people in the emerging markets. This is where I'm coming from on this topic, will become eligible for a job in the sense they will come to the age of 18. And yet those very same economies are currently projected to produce around 400 million jobs. Now, we could be wrong. AI could change something. Something else could change something. But we're unlikely to be wrong by 800 million people. So the issue is we have a real challenge here in terms of getting the right impetus for that growth, while at the same time, the real opportunity that hope and optimism and employed people with a working for someone or entrepreneurs that drive that energy, that optimism, that hope, what it means for our grandchildren, that is the topic of the day. And when I was thinking my way through this in the early part of my time in the world Bank Group, I've had the chance to work with President Tharman in his prior roles in my prior jobs, and I went and asked him if he would help me, and he thought about it, came back to me very methodically as he is, and said, I will, on the condition we really do this with a drive to put effort and energy and money and capital to work. So the jobs council that he's heading for us has come back with some thoughts and we'll come to that topic. But the principal topic is you need infrastructure, both physical and human capital. You need the right policies for business to flourish, because it is in the private sector that jobs get created. Government enables even an outstanding government like Singapore enables the private sector in Singapore to create jobs. And then if you provide the right catalytic financing for that private sector, particularly micro and small enterprises, which is where the majority of jobs get created, then you create the virtual flywheel, the positive flywheel that you want infrastructure and people being educated with the right policies, with the right financial services. And you start getting the job engine going. That's what we are here to discuss the importance of that opportunity.
Thank you very much. A very rapid follow up question. Specific sectors that you are focusing on.
So the Jobs Council also, we deliberated a great deal about going to sectors where two things can be kept in mind. One, we do not rely only on the outsourcing of jobs from the developed world to continue to be the primary source of job generation in the emerging markets, because I think the political and the trade model and the geopolitics that you started your commentary with plays in that space. So we're making a conscious decision to not get into that situation. And then the second aspect was places where the impact of AI, the way it is being discussed, as in big AI, large language models as compared to the way we are discussing it, which is small AI delivered at the edge on your computer, handheld phone by local computer, which can help farmers and and health care workers and education workers do a better job. That's those two criteria were in our system. We came back to five sectors. The first one is infrastructure. It's construction. But then what it enables, the second is primary health care. You know, the creation of a distributed network of physical and digital clinics with nurses, medical diagnostic technicians, midwives connected.
That a nurse could not do. Third is agriculture for small farmers, and this is a topic that matters to both of us greatly. He's done a lot of work in his life in this topic. I have grown up in India. You know, I'm a sort of son of Punjab, even though my father was an army officer and I worked in Nestlé for the first few years of my life. We were based in the Punjab collecting milk from farmers. The tragedy is farmers today don't want to be farmers if they're micro-sized. They sell their farm and they end up as urban poor. An objective to make them access scalable pricing and commodities and and technology and markets and get them the benefit of scale, which otherwise they don't lack, is our third category. And the fourth category is tourism, which, done well, creates the most jobs per dollar invested. And the fifth category is value added manufacturing, by which I mean no longer just extraction, but a degree of local processing to create quality jobs in those countries.
Thank you very much. And President Rahman, you have you're, of course, co-chairing the jobs council at the world Bank. And you've also been a very strong champion of this entire work around the future of jobs here at the World Economic Forum. Your perspective on this topic to set us up for the conversation?
Well, I think just to follow on from what Ajay said, if we think of the largest problems we face globally security, global health, addressing climate change, addressing all the disruptions we face, and instead of asking geo analysts, instead of asking people like us, well, what are the problems and how do we solve it? If we instead just ask ordinary people what's on their minds, right. What's on their minds for most people now is they would like us some security in their careers, not necessarily the same job, but the security of a career. They want dignity, the dignity of knowing that they are able to contribute. And they want growth. They want growth through their lives, not just growth while they are in an education system, but they want growth through their lives. Increasingly in older societies, they're very concerned about their retirement years, but their retirement years depend on their years at work. So jobs have to be the centerpiece of addressing a multitude of challenges we face. Start with what's on the minds of ordinary people. And there's so much more to be done. Because first, we haven't replicated and scaled up what has already worked in some parts of the world. I don't want to oversell the East Asian story, but some things have worked reasonably well in East Asia human capital development. And I don't just mean schools, but I mean starting from early childhood development, starting from in-utero nutrition is critical. And what India is doing now with its aspirational districts, it's anganwadis for maternal and child health. It's critical that's going to have the largest multipliers over a lifetime. And all the studies show that, right. Coming a little downstream into the school system, we still have an East Asia itself needs reform. We still have an overly academic education system. And this is true for the most advanced countries as well. And it shouldn't be an either or. It's not a binary question. It's a question about providing pathways for everyone to ascend and excel through the pathway that matches their capabilities, reduce that hierarchy that exists. Frankly, there is a hierarchy all over the world between those who excelled at the academic stream and those who are sort of doing the technical and vocational path. But that's because we haven't provided enough pathways to excellence and mastery within the technical and vocational and applied stream. And we've got to develop that actually that Singapore strategy. Right. So reduce that binary and that social hierarchy that currently exists, frankly, across the world, but especially in Asia, downstream, the job, the growth strategies that RJ was talking about are critical. Some of the strategies that we adopted in East Asia are still relevant for South Asia, for Africa, but have more limited potential. The fact is, manufacturing is now a story of technology, and it's increasingly about advanced robotics and AI. But it hasn't disappeared because if you look at China today, if you look at a set of middle income countries today, Vietnam, Brazil, Malaysia and some others, right, there's still a lot of manufacturing being done there. That's not top end, higher skill manufacturing. It's middle end. And China is still doing low end manufacturing using equipment right now. A part of that can be decanted to Africa and South Asia. And it's already being decanted to places like Tamil Nadu in India. Right. If some small portion of that can be decanted to sub-Saharan Africa, it's a big lift in manufacturing employment. So the scope exists. So I would say this as China addresses its domestic imbalance between production and consumption, its overproduction of manufacturing relative to consumption, as it addresses that structural issue. There is scope for decanting or production to other parts of the developing world. Second, all the sectors that RJ mentioned. But I do want to highlight in particular the green transition because it's an opportunity for job creation in the developing world. It so happens that the developing world, Africa in particular, and South Asia are rich in solar, wind, hydro and thermal, and they should be the sites for energy intensive production for the world apart from their own market. And all the studies show that the job multipliers coming out of a dollar of investment in renewable energy are at least three times higher than in fossil fuels. So this is not an ideological question. It's not a question of the fossil fuel industry versus the renewable industry. It's just a question of economics. Where can we generate the most jobs? And this is a real opportunity that didn't exist at the time that East Asia took off. The opportunity of creating jobs unskilled, semi-skilled and high skilled through the renewable transition. And I just add that to complement what RJ said about all the other sectors healthcare, agribusiness, tourism and so on.
Thank you very much. Thank you for laying out the challenge. And also thank you for sharing some inspiration. Before we get into the conversation on meeting this 800 million Job channel challenge. Thank you so much to both of you.
Thank you, thank you.
Okay, sir.
Thank you. What? Chairman. Yeah. You're staying? Yeah.
So he knows that we have the minister who is,
Minister.
Okay. With just a word of apology, along with the other constraints that President Trump has put on these debates. He's even cut the time available to talk about these very crucial, at least right here, this crucial issue of global development. But we're going to go for quality over quantity in our contributions. So because of various time constraints for people on the panel, and we started so late, just so everyone here knows, we are going to have to finish at five. So I'll be asking the panelists to be extremely focused in their contributions. We have the Minister for Finance and Coordinating Minister for the Economy of Nigeria. Well done. Very good to see you. And Tengku Muhammad Taufik, who's the CEO of Petronas. Nandan Nilekani, who is obviously co-founder and chairman of Infosys and also of the structure. Well, anyway, I won't list all these other things. No, no time. And the Prime minister of, Sri Lanka, Harini Suriya, thank you very much. Nandan, let me start with you. Just because we were just having a conversation and I know, you know, Tharman has talked about many aspects of this challenge. If we look at somewhere like India, obviously a lot of growth is happening, has happened. But there has this challenge is probably more evident there than it is in any other country of combining economic success with the jobs, with the technological change. So what do you think are the critical things for that?
No, I think just as we are confronting the impact of AI, which is a technology which will impact jobs, I think we also have to think about what is the technology that will enable systematic creation of jobs and systematic creation of entrepreneurs. So there are two things which I can talk about which are actually done. One is how do you create structured opportunity for a billion people? And for example, today in India, somebody gets an ID with that ID, they get a bank account, they get a mobile connection, they can start a small vegetable vending location borrowing some money. They can start taking digital payments for what they sell using UPI. That data can now be used to get a loan to grow the business. So this is a structured way of creating an escalator of opportunity. And you do that for a billion people. Then you actually creating pathways for people to both become entrepreneurs and maybe tomorrow create more jobs. So that's one way of doing it. The second thing is how do we aggregate small producers virtually using digital networks, open networks, for example, how do you take a lot of retailers and make them into a bigger force, give them access to credit systematically, market systematically, and so on. So I think these two ideas are very specific. They use technology at scale. They can make a big difference. And that's really how we should think about using technology to deal with the implications of AI and things like that.
And I was struck by Thomson's comments about needing to get rid of the social hierarchy in the UK. We talk about parity of esteem that the the vocational and academic training should be considered the same. I think as we see technological change, there may be we will need to increase the dignity attached to the standing, attached to some jobs that are very involved, intensive contact with other humans as other things get automated. But Prime Minister, even today there is a challenge there of parity, of esteem, of valuing work that is not currently valued. How do you see that as contributing?
No, absolutely. President Tharman, pointed to one disparity that we see that the vocational pathways and the academic pathways. But I think there's another area where where little attention is paid, and that's the importance of unpaid care work and how much unpaid care work actually sustains our economies. And the fact that over 70% of women are located in unpaid care work, which gets which often doesn't get counted as work, doesn't get counted in our GDP. And yet it it performs a really important role. So when we talk about job creation, particularly in countries like Sri Lanka, developing countries where women are concentrated in unpaid care work and in the informal sector, it's not just a problem of creating jobs for young people. It's also about making sure that the job creation is equitable in every sense, and that we are valuing, this kind of work that often goes unrecognized but yet has a crucial role to play in the economy. And, and economies would not be able to sustain themselves if this unpaid care work didn't happen. Yet. We don't have the ways of recognizing this, or organizing it, or redistributing it in ways that makes it more possible for women to enter paid work. Yeah, and I think the other, other important factor that we need to really look at is, the fact that we have pressures from two ends. One is the young, the young people entering the job market, and we have ageing populations at the other, other, other end where our demographics are changing, particularly in countries like Sri Lanka, which experience the youth bulge in the 80s and are now having to deal with an ageing population who also want to be productive and be part of the economy.
Minister. And how is sitting in Nigeria? How do you thinking about this, this challenge? Because there is, I'm sure it's equally a million jobs, millions and millions of jobs challenge in Nigeria too.
Well, certainly. I mean, when you look at the figures, by 2050, I think, there will be 400 billion, Africans and 25% of the world's workforce will be or Africans or the people of African, Africans will be of working age. So essentially the world's workforce, 25% of it really should be Africans. Now in Nigeria, we're focused on rapid, sustained, inclusive growth. And when we talk about inclusive, we're talking about young people, we're talking about women, and we're talking about ensuring that the whole, the whole ecosystem, just like President Tharman said, it's about dignity and about human capital development. So we're focused also on catching them very early and ensuring that those first five years, they get the nutrition, the young people get the nutrition. And it's a it's a signal for Africa. I think as Nigeria goes, perhaps Africa will also go. So we are focused on, as we heard earlier, the technology, dividend should allow us, for example, as Nigerians to do what has been done in Asia and which is, empower our young people with technology, with, automation and with data such that they can stay in Nigeria, provide services, provide support services, training, consultancy, etc. over the internet. At the same time, we are going back into a situation where manufacturing, you may call it low skill manufacturing. We have raw materials now being produced in Nigeria by our petrochemicals, plants and so forth. So that allows us to go back into that manufacturing, creating jobs in basic manufacturing. But most important of all, the metrics say that 84% of employment is micro, small and medium scale, maybe up to $300,000 a year turnover. And it is in that metric that we have to go down and empower them, empower them with, with, with, with finance and empower them with information and of course, technology. And that is what we are concentrating on in Nigeria with what we call it's called the world based Development Program. So it goes right down to the smallest, political unit, the smallest administrative unit in the municipality. Identify those, operators and empower them to increase productivity, thereby increasing employment.
Thank you. Taufik. The minister talks about making getting the dividend of technology. But of course, we also we know that there's also going to be disruption and displacement. How do you how do you see that? How do we make the dividend of technology be not just for a small part of the economy and actually be a job creating force?
Well, I'll try and attempt in that to answer that very pertinent question at two levels. I don't I don't claim to be a spokesperson for all employers in Southeast Asia. That's that's.
Well, give it a go.
Yeah.
680 million people. Last count, amongst the youngest demographics. But technology and innovation is the great equalizer. I think you've seen this evidence right in front of you in Singapore, in Taiwan, where the adoption rates are high. But this is a this is a region with vast differences. We've got internet penetration 80% in some regions, 35% in others. The rate of digital adoption as related area, it varies. It's painful as a region to see that you want to pursue the dignity that comes along with urbanization and middle, middle income status. And as policymakers struggle to do this and I do say struggle, to to cope with this conundrum, we are seeing industry by industry. This is the second level at industry by industry. And I can speak from my context. I'm a state owned agency. I'm an institution created by law, but we're also tasked to perform a commercial task of delivering energy security. But it's not just the job market has changed. The nature of jobs itself has changed because of the rate of proliferation of something like AI, something that used to take six months. Seismic interpretation. I'm going to geek out on on upstream terminology here, but it now takes a matter of days. The processes that were usually associated with delivering an upstream development where you had to deal with the logistics of deploying vessels, people that now can be assumed by a genetic AI. Now, if you're talking about a company like in my context, 50,000 people, we took a long, hard look and we were accused of being quite merciless in pushing through what I called right sizing. But people still said was a very, very poor excuse for retrenchment. It's not retrenchment, it is literally the jobs that used to be. There are no longer there or had to be delivered differently in order to remain competitive and relevant. And this is very difficult to do in a region where you're going to have to deal with maintaining the societal order, so to speak. So policymakers were looking at me and saying, did you necessarily have to do that? The answer is a company as an enterprise, yes. But also we've responded by saying in order to prepare the next intake, everything structurally from the sources of human capital that we're going to receive, needs to change the way they're educated, the way they're prepared, the way that they're equipped, needs to change because the next generation of employment is going to be so vastly different from what we see today. It's it's going to actually, be a complete departure of the standard employment for life, clear career path. It's going to be a mixture of knowledge based offerings, gig economies, gig based economies, rather than the kind of staple you see today.
President Banga I mean, you're listening to this and you've spent the time on the the jobs challenge and you discussed it at the beginning. I mean, I have to admit, when we first had a sort of prep call for this session, I thought it was slightly odd to be focused on the jobs rather than the growth, because we're so used to thinking about if you if you support a successful, rapid economic development and rapid growth, then you worry about the jobs after. Why do you what is it that will have to do differently to make this growth of the future more job creating?
I think growth in necessary condition, but not a sufficient condition for job generation. That's the big insight that's coming out with this technology kind of revolution. That's why, yes, we need growth to get jobs, but growth alone won't do it. Let me just go back to what all four of them have said for a second for you. I went through this very quickly in the opening, but when I said infrastructure, I sort of very quickly said physical and human capital and in physical I said bridges, roads, airports, power, digital. It's all there. What Nandan talked about digital public infrastructure is one of the critical infrastructures in enablement, but electricity is even more basic. So let's talk Africa, where Vallée is from. Africa is 600 million people without electricity. I'm not talking brownouts, I'm talking no electricity. So when you fly over Africa at night, you think it's not populated? That is not true. People are living the way their great grandfathers lived. That cannot be right in the 21st century. It is a travesty to think that electricity is not a basic human right. So if you want to build a digital public infrastructure, try doing that without electricity. How do you plan to charge your phone a connection to the sun with your finger? And this is not going to work. So very basic commitment is electrification. So we've talked about getting to 300 million people by 2030 with electrification. And I'm not talking about one solar cell with one fan and one light in the house. That's not productive. I'm talking about the ability to have a computer, the ability as a chemist to have a fridge for your medicines, the ability to open a hair salon, the ability to do those kinds of things. Right. So that's kind of one thing there in infrastructure, bridges, roads, airports, everyone understands digital and power tends to get ignored a little. In the world of AI, power is going to become even more important because, as we all know, the consumption of electricity currently in the current models of AI is very large now. It will improve over time because they're busy trying to figure out ways people like Nandan. Nandan is an amazing technologist. People like him are caring about reducing the consumption of electricity per quantum output of AI. But today it's a real issue human capital. I don't mean only college and the point is about dignity. Let me give you a real example. The jobs of the future that will not get impacted by large language models of AI, even in the developed world, actually require hand. We used nursing care, long term care, physical trainer, dog walker. Come to Manhattan and see it. You can see people walking six dogs at a time. It's a gig thing. They run. They make $5,000 a month on dog walking. Now, we taught our children that Stem education was their future.
Yeah.
I would argue that the first place that the impact on the developed world of really good work on AI will be in Stem jobs in London, and I are familiar with the banking industry. He from his Infosys days, me from being a recovering banker in this kind of banking is different. I'm talking about recovering banker. And if you had 15,000 people in audit and compliance and risk with AI, you need a fraction of those. So I think these are challenges of different types in the developed world and the developing world. And I don't I'm not trying to make one size fits all, but I am trying to make the case that in the developing world, we still have a chance by focusing on those three pillars of infrastructure the right business friendly policies and the right catalytic capital. Combined with those five sectors, we have a chance to allow the next 15 years to be good years for people in these countries through dpis and platforms, through the right kind of jobs. We do have a chance, and we should not let the fear of technology make us think that this is not an opportunity that exists within our grasp.
Briefly.
I just want to add something which both President Thurman talked about. That energy, new energy will create jobs and the electricity thing. I think one way to think about it is can we create millions of energy micro-entrepreneurs? Because if people are going to invest in having that rooftop solar battery and all that, they can use it for themselves today.
Under the.
Grid, they can sell it to the grid, but we can now do peer to peer trading. So if I can sell power to my neighbor, or if I'm a farmer with a system, can sell to the to a shopkeeper. Energy trading in micro amounts at variable price will be much bigger than any other market.
So just build on this for a second. In Nigeria we're doing distributed solar energy. That's how we're going to reach large numbers of people in this country for power, that when you're putting up that distributed solar energy plant, if you plant a cell phone tower at the same time, if I reach 25 million people in Nigeria with power, I now reach 25 million people. With the internet now Nandan's idea becomes real. You see what I mean? And when we are talking about reaching small farmers with open platforms, this is out of a real experience in a number of countries, but started out in Uttar Pradesh in India, where we took a platform that Google has built for us, and it's an open platform where you connect farmers and cooperatives on this side and you connect here fertilizer, insecticide, crop insurance, better water practices, better seed practices, people. And I as even as an illiterate farmer with very simple language, can learn how to get scale, which I don't get otherwise. That's the kind of stuff that.
I want to get it to. The social infrastructure that goes with all the things that you've talked about. Because if you think about, the kind of jobs that you describe in many countries now, they are the least well paid, the least valued, the least secure, possibly the dog walkers, the dog walkers that you see in Central Park.
I'm not I didn't want I don't want to divert you. I was talking about the developed world. What I'm really focused on is jobs in the developing world. I'm not creating low paying jobs in the developing world.
Yes. No, I get that. But I think it's it's still an equivalent thing that we have to think about. What? What is the social contract that goes with these.
Creating jobs in infrastructure, in healthcare, in power, in skilling, in tourism, in agriculture. These are as good jobs as any other. This is don't get me wrong, we are not talking about creating poor quality jobs. We're talking about creating excellent quality jobs. I was giving you that example in a different context, where you talked about the dignity of labor and the dignity of jobs. And I said, in the developed world, in response to that, you will find some of the jobs that will stay unimpacted by AI may actually be jobs that in the past we thought were not high quality. That's the developed world. I'm a developing, world focused guy. I don't belong here.
But isn't that also true? I don't see why it wouldn't also be true in many developing countries. Yes, you are pointing to the core jobs in electricity in other areas, but as you pointed out, there will I mean, a lot of that those jobs will also have gone some many of those white collar jobs or jobs, white collar jobs that might have been created in the future in the developing countries may now not be created. And we'll be talking about.
Five sectors we've talked about are very specifically chosen to not get the same impact. Think about the sectors. We talked about infrastructure. We talked about health care, talked about agriculture for small farmers, talked about tourism and value added manufacturing. Where do you see business process outsourcing and back offices? And I'm not talking about that. We're trying to create really good quality jobs in sectors that are relatively insulated for the next 10 to 15 years, not for 50. We will have to play that game, but not today.
Okay, so, Minister, yes.
But I thank you very much. But I think what we must not miss out is yes, we are looking for jobs, we're looking for employment, but a lot of it is informal. So we do have to go down to that informal sector. And I would like to, mention here that, we do count a lot on the fact that we have to provide power, we have to provide electricity and the emission 300 world Bank, AfDB, initiative to provide 300 million Africans with power by 2030 is a key component of building up that momentum to provide the resources, to provide power that will increase productivity and create jobs. So yes, we do have the formal sector, but there's a big informal sector that just needs to be empowered. And by the way, I said 400 billion, Nigerian, 40 million Nigerians, 2.5 billion, Africans. Otherwise it would be impossible.
That would be a bigger, bigger panel. We'd need a panel for that, I think. Thank you, Prime Minister. I'm interested. I mean, we have got to the informality point, which I know that was also in the Future of Jobs report. Is there a change in the social contract or, you know, how do we make these informal jobs, which will be a big part of the future jobs?
I mean, I think it also involves recognizing that people's lives involve lots of different aspects which often get undervalued or devalued and are and are put into sort of the informal sector or the care sector and, and are not regarded as important. You talked about dog walking, and dog walking is going to continue as long as people.
Get a robot.
Unless you get a robot. But that's not going to have the same impact. But kids need to be cared for. There's food that needs to be cooked, clothes that need to be washed. All of this is also part of people's lives, and there are people who do it. And how do we make sure that that's recognized, that's factored into how the economy is planned and how we think about jobs? I think that's equally important because, some of the hierarchies that we talk about leave out many of these critical aspects of people's lives that are essential for the sustenance, sustenance of human life and human relationships. And I think we need to bring a focus on that as well when we talk about job creation. Because what is why do we create jobs? We need jobs to make people's lives better. Then let's account for all the different types of jobs and the work that people do to make our lives better, and not just focus on particular sectors.
Thank you. I'm going to I'm going to give you the last word, partly because I know you also, you're one of the people who has to try and go through the Trump traffic to get out of town. But what is it that that governments in your country, but also across the developing world, how can they support employers like you in this challenge?
I think the president has already addressed, I think if to me, the two biggest priorities, one is energy security. As an energy executive, I think looking at energy security and affordable energy, unleashing the potential that is in the context of Asean, the 680 million people is going to be absolutely critical. So the first thing they need to do is make sure that they create policies that enable the large scale investments, whether it is cross-border grids or the enabling of flexible, smarter grids that will unleash SMEs. And by the way, SMEs, 80 to 85% of most of the economies, at least in our region. And this is where a lot of the informal economies I see a mirroring being mirrored in Africa. The second, I think, is preparing human capital for the it is we tend to hold on to traditional beliefs that Stem is resilient. It's a bulletproof, career. But eventually what is going to be routine, what is going to be repetitive is going to be dealt with by something else, whether that's automation. We've seen that, whether it's robotics, whether it's now going to be AI, agentic or otherwise, we've got to prepare the workforce for that. And I think, in at risk of sounding ominous, we cannot allow the jobs debacle to even widen the inequity gap that I think that's that's exactly what president is, is referring to. So even as we preserve as an employer our ability to remain competitive, that we're remaining mindful and we're starting to start as far back as possible in that human capital funnel. We're working with government to train them to be AI literate. We don't necessarily believe as Petronas that AI will displace people, but companies without AI will do damage to its own people as we move forward. So these are things. These are things that we are weighing heavily on our mind. Sounds ominous. Sorry to end it on a bit of a downbeat tone, but I'm giving hope by president, remarks. And I think, technology is a great equalizer. Will need to be delivered.
Thank you. Thank you to all of you. We did not have enough time, but we did have some very valuable contributions. Thank you.
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thank you, thank you all.